Although my decision was wrong in this particular instance, I was happy with myself for not playing scared poker like I did when I was in a similar position last week. Overall, I’m fairly confident that making this call will yield tons of EV in the long run and I don’t plan on letting the results of it affect my decision making in the future.

The danger in this dogma is that it can have a tendency to justify passing up too many edges during a session. Sure, we can always wait for the best spots and eek out a small winrate. However, if you really want to crush the game, you are going to have to take some higher variance edges. Therefore, patience is not always a virtue in the game of poker.

Through experience and speaking with other professionals that had warmups, I eventually was able to find a 15 minute process that I knew I could make the time for whenever I played poker. This has stayed relatively constant for about two and a half years now and I credit to a lot of my success in poker.

Don't be the guy that makes the hero triple barrel - on each street the extra 30 BB becomes much less of a factor. If it's a 3bet pot heads up pot with 200 BB stacks to start the hand, and you get to the river with 100 BB in the pot and 150 BB behind.

The key to conserving a resource is efficiency. Mental energy at the poker table is no different. The more usable poker info we can garner from the same amount of mental energy will lead to longer more profitable sessions.

I believe a lot of EV can be gained from being friendly with recreational players at the table. This doesn’t mean we have to go out of our way to make friends with the biggest fish in the game, but that we should be respectful and do what we can to make the environment more positive and appealing to recreational players.

But when we’re playing poker, especially live poker at the low stakes, we’re often consciously and subconsciously taking many seemingly minute factors into account before we make a decision. It should never be as simple as a player bet this amount on this board, what should we do now?